Mobolaji Ogunrosoye is a visual artist working with photography and collage. Her practice explores concepts of perception and distortion within images of Nigerian and Black women. To do this, she photographs herself and other Black women in idealised markers of beauty, and allows these images to be distorted and reconstructed by burning and overlaying them with magnifying lenses.
Between 2021 and the present, she has been developing a project titled Portraits, in which she explores how tangible materials such as paper, coffee, and fire can be manipulated and used as tools for distortion within portraiture. She expanded this work by replacing these materials with Perspex, printing images of Black women onto the material and layering them intuitively and spontaneously to create collages. This body of work was presented in the group exhibition The Becoming at Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany, in 2023.
In 2024, she explored distortion and scale by incorporating paper and Perspex collages into installation works shown in Grow It, Show It at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, and Unstable Point at the Jaou Tunis Biennial, Tunisia. Concurrently, she has been working on Contrasts in Loveliness, a project that examines how illusion can be used as a tool within self-portraiture to generate new meanings. She completed a visual artist residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France, in January 2026, which allowed her to further develop this project.
She participated in a Research Fellowship at the Guest Artists Space Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria, where she was granted access to the GAS Library and Picton archives. This enabled her to study and collect images of Black women for her personal archive. She is currently deepening her understanding of distortion and perception through research and experimentation with transparent materials such as Fresnel sheets and lenses.
Mobolaji has a background in architecture, which continues to inform her practice.’